Country

After doing South Korea it was my son’s turn to decide what country to do next.  He chose to do Australia.   Did you know that Australia is the only country that is also a continent?  I learned on facebook today that not all people know this which TOTALLY shocked me.  🙂

Anyways, Australia has often fascinated us so it was rather neat to spend some time learning about this country.   My son did a report on it.  We learned that Australia had a gold rush and started as a penal colony.   He learned a few other things as well but his report has gone the way of the dodo bird when we wiped my old laptop clean for him to use.   He also did up a map of Australia, figuring out the important cities and landmarks (like the Great Barrier Reef and Ayers Rock).

We Watched:

As always we watched a fair number of videos because videos show us things that we can’t always appreciate reading a book (and frankly my boy is a video oriented lad).

This video gave us a good introduction to Australia and gave us information to consider and look further into.

Did you know that the official name of Australia is the Commonwealth of Australia. This was news to us as well, but then again, Canada is called the Dominion of Canada (but we don’t say that eh?)

We went on to learn more about Ayer’s Rock, also known as Uluru. 

We watched a couple longer videos on the Great Barrier Reef, but thought a shorter one linked on the blog would be more suitable. 🙂

We checked out tourist destinations as well, because in many ways we are tourists…just doing it via videos rather than a long plane trip.  🙂

Saw some of their wildlife, and learned about their climate. We tend not to like background music for our videos, but we couldn’t escape it on this video. We found this site on animal conservancy interesting.

I could go on and on about all we learned… but I need to leave room for you to explore this interesting land on your own too eh? 🙂

Oh! I mustn’t forget. We did some art! Just some simple dot art. It was kinda fun though.  We learned all about it here.  As well as through Geography Through Art.

We Cooked:

Oh.. and we cooked (don’t we always?)  🙂  And oh my goodness we made good food.  The only thing we don’t mind not making again was the ribs as they were good but nothing better than what we’ve made before.  The spinach damper was excellent and worked well dipped in spaghetti sauce!  The rosemary butter was excellent and I’ll be making that again when I have biscuits on the table. The lamb rolls were easy enough to make and I hope to make them when I have guests sometime.  They were excellent fodder! 

We made aussie ribs, spinach damper, lamb rolls, and…. 

My son made cherry pavlova on his own.   Very sweet, tasted great, especially when frozen.  We all initially had a slice and then decided it would be better a bit colder.  🙂  I admittedly did help my lad with the meringue as it needed to be done ahead of time and he was busy writing a report. 

We had planned to make this pasta dish but decided we actually had enough with what we had made already.

If you would like to study Australia, you might find these free unit studies helpful as well.

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Pinay Homeschooler.

It was my husband’s turn to pick what country we studied about two months back and he chose to do South Korea.   It was fun picking out recipes together and spending a week learning about South Korea. 

We watched a lot of videos, did some reading of websites, and made food.  LOTS of food, we’ll get to that later though. 🙂  One of the interesting tidbits we learned about was the demilitarized zone. This is an area between North and South Korea where people aren’t allowed.  It is host to a wide variety of animals.  We spent some time learning more about the DMZ and the animals there.  This video is a brief glimpse.

We watched quite a few videos on Korea, including these ones on 10 things you might not know, and introduction to Korea.  We listened to some language lessons. 

My lad’s interest in archery and Karate led us down those paths in studying the sports of Korea.  We started with the Korea historical bow that Gakgung. 

 
We looked into their form of martial arts, learning about Korean taekwondo and Judo. We were surprised to learn that in Korea they have schools with a sports theme.  This is one of the reasons Korea produces some of the top competitors in Judo. 

Son found out what their flag looked like and some general details and filled out his sheet which… I haven’t the foggiest where he stored it.   But it was done.  In case you are curious, South Korea’s flag looks like this and is filled with symbolism.  The background is white, one of their traditional colours, it represent peace and purity.  The circle in the middle comes from the um-yang (like the yin-yang in China) and represents balance.  The red half positive, the blue half negative.  The Trigrams in the corners represent movement and harmony.  There are four to represent four separate elements: heaven, sun, moon and earth. 

We made some amazing food which we ate while chatting and listening to Korean music. 🙂 I will freely admit we didn’t play it long and we did shut it off after a while as .. well.. it’s not our style and we found it a tad distracting.

What food did we make?   YUMMY FOOD!!!  oh my goodness.. just so yummy.

Hotteok:

These were pancakes with a brown sugar filling.  Very yummy.   Took some fiddling to get them to work well and we had some leftover filling when we shouldn’t have.  But I didn’t know how to stuff them as full as what we should have.  A lad kinda gave up too.  🙂

Bulgogi:

Hubby LOVES this dish so just had to make some.  He and the lad thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kimchi:

Admittedly we didn’t make it, but hubby bought some and enjoyed it.  The lad thought it was fairly good too.  I didn’t have any since cabbage and I don’t get along.

Red bean something or other.  This was harder to make than I thought it would be and my first try burned.  But once we got it made and cooked it was really good.  But I can’t find my recipe anymore.  🙁  sorry.  It involved making a red bean paste.

Honey Butter Fried Chicken. 

Honestly, if this chicken took less time to make, I would make it all the time.  It was very very good.

We attempted to make a rice drink that they do.  Um.. we failed or it just wasn’t our thing, I really don’t know.  It needed to ferment and something else, and the drink tasted okay but I couldn’t do the rice in it and hubby sniffed it and said “nope”.   The lad tried a bit of it and seconded dad’s opinion.  🙂   I gave it good go… but sometimes things just don’t work as they should.

Stay Tuned.  Recipe Linky is Below!

Anyways, that’s our walk through South Korea, I hope you enjoyed your journey.   Just reminding you if you want a more traditional approach to studying countries, to check out SchoolhouseTeachers.com.  They have some wonderfully indepth country studies for you to embark upon. Valetines Sale is: February 12-16, 2018
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OH!   I also wanted to mention how much we’ve been enjoying the Olympic Games today… watching curling and moguls.   Did you know my friend Lori put together a wonderful Olympics study?   I KNOW how awesome is that!  So grab up your middle schoolers and have some fun with the Olympics.   Find it right here!

What else…oh.. some unit studies you might find helpful in learning about South Korea.

Knowledge quest.   Confessions of a homeschooler.  CIA.  Half-a-hundred acre.